From Cover To Cover

Maus banned, The Beat Covers SDCC, My Hero Academia ending, and more— Comics Bookmark 6/30/2024

Maus ban. Who created Wolverine? The best selling comic of 2025 already announced. New Mignola!!!!! All that and more in this week’s links.

Maus banned, The Beat Covers SDCC, My Hero Academia ending, and more— Comics Bookmark 6/30/2024
Maus by Art Spiegelman

I've really been digging Chris Condon and Jacob Phillip's That Texas Blood (briefly talked about here) and while The Enfield Gang Massacre serves as a prequel to their series, you can read it by itself easily. It's a great western tale about how our stories change over time and I wrote a bit about it this week.

Finding the Truth in Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips’ The Enfield Gang Massacre
The title gives away what’s going to happen but The Enfield Gang Massacre is about stories as much as it is about the massacre.

Headlines

Sarah Becker Dies: MTV’s ‘The Real World: Miami’ Alum Was 52
Sarah Becker, best known for appearing in MTV’s The Real World Season 5, has died. She was 52.

I'm so sorry to hear about this. While most of the headlines highlight Becker's time on MTV's The Real World, she was also involved in the early day of Wildstorm back in La Jolla, CA.

I think it's also important to say that if you're having any suicidal thoughts, try to seek help right away. There's a lot of different ways you can do that, starting with calling 998.


Logan’s Run: Roy Thomas, Len Wein, and the curious case of the Wolverine - The Comics Journal
Who really did create Wolverine? And just as importantly, why should any of the rest of us care?

There’s a lot here in this fairly comprehensive read by Zach Rabiroff. One thing we probably won’t get for years, if not decades, is what drove Marvel /Disney to make this change to how it documents the ownership of Wolverine. Right or wrong, I can see what drove Thomas to pursue this but what was the argument that won the corporation over to now giving Thomas co-creator credit on Wolverine? And what kind of doors does this open for other editors to pursue having their names added as co-creators to other characters?

And I haven’t seen it anywhere before (and if this has been called out elsewhere, I apologize in advance,) but the way that Rabiroff makes this part of the continuing issue about creator credit, tying what’s happening here back to the controversies of the creation of Superman and Batman, shows just how this has been a part of the fabric of the business of comics.


MTV News takes down 30-year digital archive with no advanced warning
MTV News has taken down its digital archive, removing thousands of news stories, profiles, interviews, and other editorial features from the web.

This is a bit related to comics because somewhere in MTV News' run, they started covering comics pretty good, looking to take on the likes of Newsarama and CBR at the time. It feel like it only lasted maybe a year or two before they shut it down but I remember their coverage being pretty good and expansive. Was the comic coverage taken down years ago? I don't remember it even still being accessible.

But this also speaks to how large chunks of articles and information is lost when sites like this just wipe out their content (and that's all it is to them) rather than trying to figure out some way to archive it.


‘Smile’ Author and Illustrator Raina Telgemeier Announces New Kids Graphic Novel with Scott McCloud (Exclusive)
The writer and illustrator is teaming up with author Scott McCloud to publish a new graphic novel for young readers, ‘The Cartoonists Club,’ which will publish in spring 2025.

Well, I think we have a front runner for best selling book of 2025. I'll be curious to see how this collaboration works. Both are great storytellers (even if I don't always like McCloud's stories– any The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln stans out there– but his Zot! and Understanding Comics are still pivotal comics even if we don't talk about them as much.) And it's great to see that Telgemeier continuing to be a creative artist and mentor for these younger generations.


Texas school district agrees to remove ‘Anne Frank’s Diary,’ ‘Maus,’ ‘The Fixer’ and 670 other books after right-wing group’s complaint - Jewish Telegraphic Agency
The district in the Rio Grande Valley immediately agreed with activists who said the books were “filthy and evil.”

Maus? Filthy and evil? Maybe in what it depicts but not in the character of the book itself. More and more, you can tell that these people don’t read the books that they’re banning and, even worse, are trying to suppress the stories and histories contained in those books.

Comic Sites on Comic Sites

Comic-Con: Dean Devlin’s Electric Entertainment Teams with Heidi MacDonald’s Comics Beat for Daily News Show (Exclusive)
The ‘Independence Day’ scribe and the respected comic book journalist will help offer a behind-the-scenes look at the convention each day.

This is an interesting team up. I can't wait to see how it works out for MacDonald and Comics Beat. A long time ago, when there was a SciFi channel, they had a couple of years where they really covered San Diego (and this was before nerd culture became pop culture) and for those of us not there, it was a great way to experience it.

Manga

Jujutsu Kaisen manga’s current hiatus will be extended as mangaka recovers from “strange illness”
Not even Gojo could see that coming.
As the My Hero Academia manga comes to a close after 10 years, Kohei Horikoshi shows what it means to write a superhero story with a definitive ending
Opinion | Kohei Horikoshi is bringing his long-running story full circle

Both of these stories make me feel like I‘m out of touch with a whole, popular section of manga. I didn’t even realize that My Hero Academia was that old.

Business

Marvel Studios & Marvel Comics are now working “much more closely” this year to get MCU fans into comic stores says publisher
The House of Ideas has a good idea - selling Marvel Comics to fans of the Marvel Studios movies & TV shows.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

WEBTOON’s updated SEC filing opens up the books
WEBTOON’s updated SEC filing opens up the books on the business, revealing the size and the extent of the business, with some surprises

Talking about feeling out of touch with whole segments of comic fandom…

The Funny Pages

I think I knew about this version of Richard McGuire’s Here (I wrote about the RAW version last year) but I’ve never seen it before. I know they’re making a movie out of it but that trailer for it looked awful. Go track down any of the comic versions of it and be prepared to loose yourself in this timeless story.

Interviews

The Krakoan era of the X-Men between politics, deaths and rebirths: interview with Kieron Gillen – The White Space
After Al Ewing, Lo Spazio Bianco hosts another of the writers that forged the Krakoan years of Marvel mutants, Kieron Gillen.

First off, I love the graphic image of this one, with Gillen the center seat of the Immortal X-Men #1.

This is also a good interview about Gillen's time back at Marvel, with a particular focus on his X-Men time but also diving a bit into his Eternals run. Is it weird that before the next X-era really beings, I'm already starting to feel a bit nostalgic for Krakoa? I think a large part of that is due to Gillen's involvement in bringing this most recent large story to an end.

Reviews & Features

The Wicked + the Divine #1 - 10 Years Later - Graphic Policy
The Wicked + the Divine #1 uses fandom and one’s favorite music and art to explore what it feels like to think that you’re immortal

I would love to see Logan do an issue-by-issue breakdown revisiting The Wicked + The Divine all these years later to see what his continuing thoughts on it are. When we were both writing (and he editing) on the now sadly defunct Sound on Sight site (now some weird zombie site under a different name,) I could see his love for the book. I really liked it but he connected to it on a whole different level than I did. Once at Panel Patter, I wrote "Some people are W+D people..." and I was thinking of Logan here.

Books in Bites 25: Who’s That Up There Who’s Asking Who’s That Down Here? - SOLRAD
SOLRAD’s Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Elkin, returns with his capsule review column, Books in Bites, looking at work by Kit Anderson, Simon Moreton, S. Meralli, and PF Radice

Always like it when Daniel is sharing his thoughts on books. I haven't read any Simon Moreton in a while and think I need to rectify that.

The best comics of 2024 so far
Including Tokyo These Days, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, and, yes... even Transformers!

This is a pretty good list from the fine people at Polygon. While I haven't read this Newburn story yet, I think they picked the right Zdarsky there.

And that Doom comic may be the most underrated book of the year, at least the most underrated Marvel book. Sanford Greene killed it on that book.

Destro Supplies Another Great Joe Comic: Single Minded for June 19th, 2024
Comic Reviews and commentary

Rob liked this book a bit better than I did but I'm kind of intrigued by this whole GI Joe revival (I refuse to call it Energon or anything like that; I'm way more of A GI Joe guy than a Transformers guy) so I've been dipping into most of the series. This one left me a bit cold and I really didn't make any connection to it. The news this week that the team behind the Duke miniseries are taking on the main GI Joe comic actually has me a bit excited. Duke was a good action comic (not as good as Scarlett #1) so hopefully it gets to be its own story and not just an adjunct to the Transformers story.